


Non-Disclosure

by karanguni



Series: Nasdack [9]
Category: FFVII, FFXII
Genre: Alternate Universe - Real World, M/M, Stockmarket AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-11-01
Updated: 2008-11-01
Packaged: 2017-10-14 23:08:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/154491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Balthier wants to know more than Tseng wants to tell. Post-original canon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Non-Disclosure

8 a.m. He's in long before the morning bell. He walks into the building, footsteps echoing off into empty space, and fights the same fight as the morning sunlight, battering through the weave of urban Manhattan. He's there before everyone else. He'll leave after everyone's gone. Cyclical, constant, certain.

Yet Tseng, the office has long known, is not the kind of man that you want to try to map. He isn't erratic, isn't impulsive, isn't anything the kind to do anything truly unexpected: but he's one of those odd identities that never equate. His preciseness makes him less predictable and more unapproachable; Tseng doesn't keep a secretary, doesn't keep anyone absolutely informed, and displays – for all his loyalty – a surprising inclination to follow no one and come and go as and when he pleases.

Just off high noon. Trading ebbs, analytics churn, Tseng disappears into the ether of the lunch hour madness. The streets suddenly teem with their infamous life. People walk so fast that the world blurs. Tarmac burns. Irate taxicab drivers honk and swear and inch down one-way streets, one-way avenues. New York's one of the best cities to pull over yourself like a cloak. The sound and the psychosis lets any man vanish. He'll always pick up his cell phone, but he'll never tell you where he goes.

'Boss just likes his privacy,' Reno shrugs when Balthier asks. 'S'like that policy – don't ask, don't tell. We're not gonna ask. And he sure as hell isn't going to tell us anything we don't need to know.'

'He's tight lipped about anything that isn't the job,' Elena adds, more than a little primly even though she's getting to like Balthier, like him and his charm and the way he takes her out for lunch and walks with her when she's buying shoes and makes her feel like a woman. 'Some of us weren't even around back then. He's been in Shinra for very, very long, after all. Since he graduated, I think. We've been through any number of people since that long ago. Mining for information about his past behind his back isn't going to get you anywhere.'

Reno grins, slow and lazy like he's indulging in some old joke. 'Yeah, well. You're just selfish because it's taken you so damn long to gather tidbits for your shrine to Tseng, and if you think he's hot now how hot could he have been fresh outta univers-- ow!'

Mid-day. Tseng steps back into the office, and they turn to him and produce work that somehow – but always – gets done over the last two hours worth of ordered-in food and scuttlebutt and laziness. Tseng doesn't really care for the slack, open gape of Reno's collarbone or Rude's odd choice of eyewear. He talks to them like he talks to Reeve, even though they're just (his) pawns when he usually plays with kings.

There's a reason, Balthier rationalises, that they call Tseng boss when it's Rufus Shinra who's pulling all their puppet strings. Rufus is elevated, half-myth in addition to being half-man. He doesn't need any protecting from the resident Bunansa, who's born into that same class and who can play all of Rufus' weird little games as often as he pleases.

Tseng's a different ideal altogether: the poor man gone classed, the one who's terrifying not just because he's good, but because his position points to the fact that he's better. The office can sometimes resemble a den; noisy and so full of inappropriate hilarity that Balthier wonders for a while how Shinra keeps the reputation it does. The answer comes like the rub of two coins; metal against metal igniting an intense kind of genius that rises from slack enervation whenever Tseng steps to the helm during market hours and says, we have a plan, and this is how we are going to execute it.

They protect him with their flippancy, even though Tseng doesn't need any kind of protection. Maybe they're just possessive of him, the way that small men are of greater ones. There's a social understanding in Shinra, carefully constructed and casually elaborate. Trying to get anything out of Rufus' men can be like wringing blood from a stone, if they choose not to speak. There's hierarchy here. Of knowledge, and people.

Closing bell. Reno's out of the door before anyone can call him on backlog; Elena's shuffling; Rude's nowhere to be found; Rufus is somewhere in midtown by now, charming competitors and buying them dinners laced with the poison of his charisma. Tseng is in the office, right where he chooses to belong, starting on his evening with the same steadiness that he starts his days.

'So,' Balthier says, curled in a corner of the lounge, a few convenient feet from the coffee machine that Tseng favours. 'I've contemplated this on my own, considered, corresponded with the rest of the crew, conversed, cajoled, coaxed - and charmed, Tseng, to the utmost of my not inconsiderable ability - only to have to resort to asking. Everyone says it's not their story to tell.' Balthier flicks his fingers, an old mannerism indicative of dismissal or disgust. 'Even Rufus, and you know how much he loves to talk about you when you're facing the other way.'

Tseng waits for his flat white passively. He's learned to let Balthier talk until he makes sense. Sometimes it even takes a while.

Balthier tilts his head. 'I wondered, Tseng, a third side? Yet you're as viciously selfish about your control as your boy is, and it doesn't seem to balance. Three's not evenly divisible; liars who lie a third time are cheats.' Fingers are drummed. The coffee machine hisses obediently. Tseng reaches for half a sugar. The clink of his spoon against the curve of his cup is echoed by the sound of Balthier's rings, the first against the second, both striking a third. 'So who is Veld? Politics, like Rufus? Geography, like me? History? Economics - the legendary mentor? A mythological beast? Shinra's dark angel? Your first physical education instructor?'

The last one makes Tseng smile against his own will, lips curving up hard and uncontrollable. 'I could tell you, but you'd never believe me.' He leans against the wall and sips his coffee, letting his eyes rest on Balthier.

'You could always try me.' Balthier's gaze is shuttered, shadowed.

'You don't always enjoy it when I do.'

Balthier's lip curls. 'I'm no golden child, Tseng, I've no right to judge. Pots and kettles,' he shrugs, but it's more a hunch of his shoulders than an action of balance, 'enough use and we all turn black.'

'Not everything's about sex,' Tseng says, ponderously.

'I don't believe you.'

That makes Tseng's smile evolve into a message, an I-told-you-so. He finishes up his coffee and washes his cup. Balthier's eyes are glued to the back of his neck. 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodies,' Tseng quips, as he turns to leave.

'I'd say that anyone who tries to guard you must be insane,' Balthier replies.

Tseng shrugs out of his blazer, and standing there with his shirtsleeves rolled up he looks stripped down, powerful, bare and completely opaque. He folds his blazer over his arm, and says only, 'There's always a bigger fish,' before he slips out and away to his office, and blends right back into the world he's built up around him, impregnable and transparent and potent in the air.

-

Words like that shouldn't make Balthier feel anything other than exasperated, but they keep him up till eleven in the evening, sitting in the darkness of Rufus' apartment with his legs stretched out and Tseng nowhere around that night. He keeps his frenetic movement caged in artificial stillness until Rufus unlocks his door, coming in reeking of affluence and contracts signed, and when Balthier asks, 'Who is Veld?' with a little more urgency, little more confusion, Rufus' empathic look shot over the shadows of the room and Rufus' quiet, half-amused utterance of ah make him feel anything, anything other than simply nothing.


End file.
